Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
Print: COPYRIGHT ©: 1970; ISBN: 0-03-085322-2; PUBLISHER: New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston; PAGES: 487; UNABRIDGED; (Info from Wikipedia)

Digital: ©: October 23, 2012; PUBLISHER: Open Road Media; PAGES: 482; Unabridged (Info from Amazon.com)

*Audio: COPYRIGHT ©: 14 Oct 2009; PUBLISHER: Blackstone Publishing; DURATION: 14: hrs. (approx..); Unabridged; (Info from version available in Libby app)

Feature Film or tv: Yes. Produced by HBO Films. Premiered May 27, 2007. Starring Adam Beach, Anna Paquin, Chevez Ezaneh, August Schellenberg, Aidan Quinn

SERIES: No

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
SELECTED: I’ve been doing some reading on Native Americans, and if I didn’t already know it, the citing of this book in many of those I have read, indicated that this is a seminal work on the subject.
ABOUT: The book provides a history of indigenous Americans and the devolution of their encounters with the European colonists. This book speaks to the colonists’ initial sense of geniality towards natives as they were welcomed and ushered into the country, offered provisions, and shown the lay of the land.
As time wore on, and the new Americans battled for freedom and dominion over their newly adopted land, they accepted the assistance of the Natives as though it were their due. And as the colonists populated, developed, and expanded across the land, an intolerance developed toward what they grew to perceive as their backward, unchristian, ignorant, barbaric, uncivilized hosts; and they began scheming to remake these people into their own image. When efforts failed, the Euro-Americans sought to remove the Natives through various means—first battles, and eventually, relocation—then, more battles when each time they thought they’d found worthless land to dump the Natives on, they soon discovered it wasn’t worthless and they fervently wanted it back. The book speaks to the readers through voices of the Natives, and from military reports, and leaves the reader understanding, if they hadn’t already, the travesty that is the history of the Native Americans since the arrival of the Europeans.
OVERALL IMPRESSION: Very well organized and very well told.

AUTHOR:
Dee Brown: (From Wikipedia)
“Dorris Alexander "Dee" Brown (February 29, 1908 – December 12, 2002) was an American novelist, historian, and librarian. His most famous work, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), details the history of the United States' westward colonization of the continent between 1830 and 1890 from the point of view of Native Americans.”

NARRATOR:
Grover Gardner- From Wikipedia:
“Grover Gardner (b 1956)[1] is an American narrator of audiobooks. As of May 2018, he has narrated over 1,200 books.[2] He was the Publishers Weekly "Audiobook Narrator of the Year" (2005) and is among AudioFile magazine's "Best Voices of the Century".[2]
Biography
Gardner is a native of Pennsylvania.[1] He attended high school in Belgium.[1] He graduated from Florida's Rollins College in 1978 as a theater major.[1]
In 1981, Gardner was an actor in the Washington, D.C. region, working at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company under Howard Shalwitz.[4] He won a number of lead actor awards for plays such as Metamorphoses and The Rocky Horror Show.
Gardner heard about and auditioned for the Library of Congress' Books for the Blind Program. He worked at fellow theater actor Flo Gibson's Audio Book Contractors in the DC region to produce classic literature on cassette tape. Over time, his acting career tapered off and audiobooks took over.[1] Eventually he established his own independent studio in Maryland where he recorded books for Books on Tape.[5] In 2007, he moved to Ashland, Oregon where he became Studio Director of Blackstone Audio.[5]
Gardner has also narrated under the aliases Tom Parker and Alexander Adams.”
It would seem that a lot of great narrators started as readers for the blind. That’s so wonderful that a generous spirit lead to financial and popular success. Grover, of course, was pitch-perfect in this narration.

GENRE:
Nonfiction; U. S. History

TIME FRAME:
1492 - 1890

SUBJECTS: (Not comprehensive)
Native Americans; European Settlers; Spanish; Battle of Little Bighorn; Battle of Wounded Knee; Indian Removal; Europeanization; Manifest Destiny; Wampanoags; Narragansetts, Iroquois, Cherokee; Navajo Nation; Santee Dakota; Hunkpapa Lakota; Oglala Lakota; Cheyenne; Apache; Arapaho; Modoc; Kiowa; Comanche’ Nez Perce; Ponca; Ute; Miniconjou Lakota

DEDICATION:
“For Nicolas Brave Wolf”.

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From Chapter One “Their Manners Are Decorous and Praiseworthy”
“Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun.
Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle, give up our homes, our country bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will cry with me, “Never! Never!”
—TECUMSEH OF THE SHAWNEES
IT BEGAN WITH CHRISTOPHER Columbus, who gave the people the name Indios. Those Europeans, the white men, spoke in different dialects, and some pronounced the word Indien, or Indianer, or Indian. Peaux-rouges, or redskins, came later. As was the custom of the people when receiving strangers, the Tainos on the island of San Salvador generously presented Columbus and his men with gifts and treated them with honor.
“So tractable, so peaceable, are these people,” Columbus wrote to the King and Queen of Spain, “that I swear to your Majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy.”
All this, of course, was taken as a sign of weakness, if not heathenism, and Columbus being a righteous European was convinced the people should be “made to work, sow and do all that is necessary and to adopt our ways.” Over the next four centuries (1492–1890) several million Europeans and their descendants undertook to enforce their ways upon the people of the New World.
Columbus kidnapped ten of his friendly Taino hosts and carried them off to Spain, where they could be introduced to the white man’s ways. One of them died soon after arriving there, but not before he was baptized a Christian. The Spaniards were so pleased that they had made it possible for the first Indian to enter heaven that they hastened to spread the good news throughout the West Indies.
The Tainos and other Arawak people did not resist conversion to the Europeans’ religion, but they did resist strongly when hordes of these bearded strangers began scouring their islands in search of gold and precious stones. The Spaniards looted and burned villages; they kidnapped hundreds of men, women, and children and shipped them to Europe to be sold as slaves. Arawak resistance brought on the use of guns and sabers, and whole tribes were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people in less than a decade after Columbus set foot on the beach of San Salvador, October 12, 1492.
Communications between the tribes of the New World were slow, and news of the Europeans’ barbarities rarely overtook the rapid spread of new conquests and settlements. Long before the English-speaking white men arrived in Virginia in 1607, however, the Powhatans had heard rumors about the civilizing techniques of the Spaniards. The Englishmen used subtler methods. To ensure peace long enough to establish a settlement at Jamestown, they put a golden crown upon the head of Wahunsonacook, dubbed him King Powhatan, and convinced him that he should put his people to work supplying the white settlers with food. Wahunsonacook vacillated between loyalty to his rebellious subjects and to the English, but after John Rolfe married his daughter, Pocahontas, he apparently decided that he was more English than Indian After Wahunsonacook died, the Powhatans rose up in revenge to drive the Englishmen back into the sea from which they had come, but the Indians underestimated the power of English weapons. In a short time the eight thousand Powhatans were reduced to less than a thousand.
In Massachusetts the story began somewhat differently but ended virtually the same as in Virginia. After the Englishmen landed at Plymouth in 1620, most of them probably would have starved to death but for aid received from friendly natives of the New World. A Pemaquid named Samoset and three Wampanoags named Massasoit, Squanto, and Hobomah became self-appointed missionaries to the Pilgrims. All spoke some English, learned from explorers who had touched ashore in previous years. Squanto had been kidnapped by an English seaman who sold him into slavery in Spain, but he escaped through the aid of another Englishman and finally managed to return home. He and the other Indians regarded the Plymouth colonists as helpless children; they shared corn with them from the tribal stores, showed them where and how to catch fish, and got them through the first winter. When spring came they gave the white men some seed corn and showed them how to plant and cultivate it.
For several years these Englishmen and their Indian neighbors lived in peace, but many more shiploads of white people continued coming ashore. The ring of axes and the crash of falling trees echoed up and down the coasts of the land which the white men now called New England. Settlements began crowding in upon each other. In 1625 some of the colonists asked Samoset to give them 12,000 additional acres of Pemaquid land. Samoset knew that land came from the Great Spirit, was as endless as the sky, and belonged to no man. To humor these strangers in their strange ways, however, he went through a ceremony of transferring the land and made his mark on a paper for them. It was the first deed of Indian land to English colonists.
Most of the other settlers, coming in by thousands now, did not bother to go through such a ceremony. By the time Massasoit, great chief of the Wampanoags, died in 1662 his people were being pushed back into the wilderness. His son Metacom foresaw doom for all Indians unless they united to resist the invaders. Although the New Englanders flattered Metacom by crowning him King Philip of Pokanoket, he devoted most of his time to forming alliances with the Narragansetts and other tribes in the region.
In 1675, after a series of arrogant actions by the colonists, King Philip led his Indian confederacy into a war meant to save the tribes from extinction. The Indians attacked fifty-two settlements, completely destroying twelve of them, but after months of fighting, the firepower of the colonists virtually exterminated the Wampanoags and Narragansetts. King Philip was killed and his head publicly exhibited at Plymouth for twenty years. Along with other captured Indian women and children, his wife and young son were sold into slavery in the West Indies.
When the Dutch came to Manhattan Island, Peter Minuit purchased it for sixty guilders in fishhooks and glass beads, but encouraged the Indians to remain and continue exchanging their valuable peltries for such trinkets. In 1641, Willem Kieft levied tribute upon the Mahicans and sent soldiers to Staten Island to punish the Raritans for offenses which had been committed not by them but by white settlers. The Raritans resisted arrest, and the soldiers killed four of them. When the Indians retaliated by killing four Dutchmen, Kieft ordered the massacre of two entire villages while the inhabitants slept. The Dutch soldiers ran their bayonets through men, women, and children, hacked their bodies to pieces, and then leveled the villages with fire.
For two more centuries these events were repeated again and again as the European colonists moved inland through the passes of the Alleghenies and down the westward-flowing rivers to the Great Waters (the Mississippi) and then up the Great Muddy (the Missouri).
The Five Nations of the Iroquois, mightiest and most advanced of all the eastern tribes, strove in vain for peace. After years of bloodshed to save their political independence, they finally went down to defeat. Some escaped to Canada, some fled westward, some lived out their lives in reservation confinement.
During the 1760’s Pontiac of the Ottawas united tribes in the Great Lakes country in hopes of driving the British back across the Alleghenies, but he failed. His major error was an alliance with French-speaking white men who withdrew aid from the peaux-rouges during the crucial siege of Detroit.
A generation later, Tecumseh of the Shawnees formed a great confederacy of midwestern and southern tribes to protect their lands from invasion. The dream ended with Tecumseh’s death in battle during the War of 1812.
Between 1795 and 1840 the Miamis fought battle after battle, and signed treaty after treaty, ceding their rich Ohio Valley lands until there was none left to cede.
When white settlers began streaming into the Illinois country after the War of 1812, the Sauks and Foxes fled across the Mississippi. A subordinate chief, Black Hawk, refused to retreat. He created an alliance with the Winnebagos, Pottawotamies, and Kickapoos, and declared war against the new settlements. A band of Winnebagos, who accepted a white soldier chief’s bribe of twenty horses and a hundred dollars, betrayed Black Hawk, and he was captured in 1832. He was taken East for imprisonment and display to the curious. After he died in 1838, the governor of the recently created Iowa Territory obtained Black Hawk’s skeleton and kept it on view in his office.
In 1829, Andrew Jackson, who was called Sharp Knife by the Indians, took office as President of the United States. During his frontier career, Sharp Knife and his soldiers had slain thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, but these southern Indians were still numerous and clung stubbornly to their tribal lands, which had been assigned them forever by white men’s treaties. In Sharp Knife’s first message to his Congress, he recommended that all these Indians be removed westward beyond the Mississippi. “I suggest the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi … to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes, as long as they shall occupy it.””

RATING:.
5

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
5/2/2024- 5/29/2024 ( )

A grim and hard to read factual account of the genocide of the Native American. The author never let's his emotions get the better of himself but lets his anger show in the baldly stated facts of history.
This book should be read alongside the stories of the destruction of the Aztecs and Incas by the Spainish. There is a similar disregard for (foreign/non Christian) humanity. A willingness to do anything for gold or land, and an inability to maintain the rule of law in the face of a short term gain.
This story is still being repeated somewhere in the world, like the Amazon basin where indigenous tribes are being pressure to move off their land make way for development.
It will continue to happen while there are people who don't read or write books like this one. ( )

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Brown-Enterre-mon-coeur-a-Wounded-Knee/559980

> LA TRAGÉDIE DE LA CONQUÊTE DE L’OUEST. — Historien et bibliothécaire de l'université de l'Illinois, Dee Brown a consacré sa vie à l'histoire des États-Unis au XIXᵉ siècle, jusqu’à son décès en 2002.
Publié pour la première fois en 1970, Enterre mon cœur à Wounded Knee a été traduit dans le monde entier. Pour une bonne raison : ce livre a changé pour toujours la vision que nous avons de l’histoire des États-Unis et de la relation de ce pays avec les premiers habitants du continent américain.
Largement basé sur des documents inédits (archives militaires et gouvernementales, procès-verbaux des traités, récits de première main…), il retrace les trente années décisives, de 1860 à 1890, qui ont marqué ce que l’on appelle « la conquête de l'Ouest » : de la longue Marche des Navajos en 1860 au massacre de Wounded Knee en 1890, Enterre mon cœur se fait la chronique de la dépossession des Indiens qui perdent leurs terres, leur liberté et souvent la vie au nom de l’expansion américaine.
Si l’histoire est souvent écrite du point de vue des vainqueurs, ce livre donne la parole aux vaincus et compose un chant tragique et inoubliable.
Ce classique, qui était depuis quelques années épuisé en France, fait enfin l’objet d’une nouvelle édition entièrement révisée : un superbe cahier photos accompagne cette nouvelle traduction. La préface de Joseph Boyden, le célèbre écrivain canadien d’origine irlando-amérindienne, met en perspective l’apport de cet ouvrage à la relecture de l’histoire humaine.
*Enterre mon cœur à Wounded Knee, Dee Brown, Préface de Joseph Boyden, (traduit de l’américain par Nathalie Cunnington), Ed. Albin Michel, 480 pages, 24 €.
—L’Homme en Question, (24), Eté 2008, (p. 6)

> EXTRAIT DE LA PRÉFACE DE JOSEPH BOYDEN, auteur du Chemin des âmes et des Saisons de la solitude, à paraître en août 2009. — C’est en 1982 que j’ai pour la première fois entendu parler d’Enterre mon cœur à Wounded Knee […] Il avait été publié en Amérique plus de dix ans auparavant […] À la lecture de ce livre, ma façon de voir le monde, mes opinions politiques, ma sensibilité ont subi une véritable révolution conceptuelle. L’adolescent à problèmes que j’étais s’est retrouvé contraint de regarder autour de lui. Mais surtout, fait prendre conscience du sang qui coulait dans mes veines, le sang d’ancêtres Ojibwés et européens […] fort que nous devons comprendre, dans toute leur complexité, notre histoire commune et les actions de nos ancêtres avant de pouvoir reconnaître la responsabilité de notre sang dans cette folie meurtrière. C’est seulement à ce moment-là que nous pourrons avancer tous ensemble […] Dix-sept ans après que je me le suis procuré, ce livre continue de guider ma plume. Parfois en sortent les voix des opprimés, parfois encore, celles de fantômes qui exigent simplement qu’on les écoute. Nous sommes tout à la fois les conquérants et les conquis, dans un même corps, et c’est cela que Dee Brown nous invite à reconnaître.
*Enterre mon cœur à Wounded Knee, Dee Brown, Préface de Joseph Boyden, (traduit de l’américain par Nathalie Cunnington), Ed. Albin Michel, 480 pages, 24 €.
—L’Homme en Question, (24), Eté 2008, (p. 6)

Dee Brown se v této knize pokusil zmapovat temnou kapitolu amerických dějin, kterou bezesporu dobývání amerického Západu je, a vytvořil fascinující dokument o období let 60 – 90 předminulého století, o období takzvaných indiánských válek, kdy se vlivem stále rostoucí expanze bílých osadníku, valících se na Západ jako nespoutaná lavina s definitivní platností dovršil tragický osud původních obyvatel severoamerického kontinentu.

An absolutely essential read. History that will move you to tears time and time again. ( )